Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, the latest blockbuster in The Da Vinci Code trilogy, is selling better on Kindle than in hardcover on Amazon.com.
Two days after the books’ release, Amazons’s hourly-updated Mystery and Thrillers page, which lists the genre’s top 10 sellers, showed the Kindle version, priced at US $9.99, in the top spot. The hardcover version, which Amazon is selling for US$16.17, held second place. Exact sales figures were not available.
Publisher Random House originally decided against releasing a Kindle version of the book, saying Kindle’s low price would damage hardcover sales. But it relented three weeks before release, releasing the book on Kindle the same day as the hardcover version hit the stores.
Pirated copies of The Lost Symbol can already be obtained for free from illegal download websites, three days after the book’s worldwide release.